My son’s seventh grade social studies class was recently learning about the Little Rock Nine, the nine Black students who enrolled at an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 and were met by a hostile white mob and the Arkansas National Guard blocking their entrance.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower eventually sent federal troops to escort them, but not before the teenagers endured taunting, threats, removal by police and the eyes of a watchful, nervous nation as the media recorded their attempts to access an education.
Part of my son’s homework assignment was to answer what might have happened if some of the white students at Central High School had stood or walked in solidarity with their new Black classmates. Would upstanders have changed that particular moment in history?
It was, I thought, an excellent way to invite students to do more than memorize the names and dates in our history, but to contemplate how history is shaped, to imagine what might have been and, importantly, to place themselves in the shoes of the people who were there.
We have a word for that last part, obviously. It’s empathy. And I think it’s next to impossible to absorb history without it. To not just gain a passing understanding of history, but to contextualize history, to connect it to today, to connect it to yourself and your role in the world.
And to avoid repeating the worst, most shameful parts.
Unfortunately, we’re living through a moment when some of the greatest tools for building and sustaining empathy are under attack: books.
“Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades,” the New York Times reported on Jan. 30. “The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an ‘unprecedented’ 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.”
Christopher M. Finan, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, told the New York Times he hasn’t seen this volume of book challenges since the 1980s. In some states, school board members have even filed criminal complaints against librarians and teachers for providing certain titles.
In Athens, Tennessee, the McMinn County School Board unanimously voted to ban “Maus,” Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 graphic novel about his father’s experience in an Auschwitz concentration camp. The board objected to nudity and profanity in the book.
If you sit on a board that helps shape young minds and you read a novel that narrates and contextualizes the trauma of the Holocaust, a stain on humanity that killed millions upon millions of people, and you decide the nudity and profanity are the disturbing parts? Your moral compass is broken.
More to the point, though, you’re robbing those same young minds of knowledge infused and informed by empathy. You’re keeping history sealed away in a time capsule, rather than inviting students to interrogate it and be moved by it.
In July 2020, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson shared some antisemitic posts on his Instagram account. Friends and NFL leadership called him out and he apologized.
Meanwhile, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, whose motto is “Take history to heart, take a stand for humanity,” quickly assembled a trunk full of books and other learning materials for Jackson and his teammates: “A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism,” by Phyllis Goldstein. “Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. “The Cage,” by Ruth Minsky Sender, which tells the true story of a family deported to Auschwitz.
“We sent primarily books,” Susan Abrams, Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center CEO, told me at the time. “We sent several Holocaust memoirs by survivors. We believe it’s particularly poignant to hear first hand from those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust to understand why invoking Hitler is so painful. We’re hoping it will spark interest in reading further and talking further and having a wider historical worldview.”
A year and a half prior, when a group of high school students from Wisconsin was photographed making a gesture identical to the Nazi salute, the museum reached out to Baraboo School District officials and invited them to bring their students on a tour.
“Our docents say they were one of the most engaged and wonderful groups we’ve ever had,” Abrams told me. “Now we have an ongoing relationship with that school. From these bad incidents can come good things.”
Minds, especially young ones, can change. Hearts, especially young ones, can grow. We should never shield them from the stories that allow for both.
“Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question,” Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in a gorgeous New York Times essay, “My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.” “A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.”
And this:
“If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging — and even hateful or problematic — ideas, then something must be fixed in our society,” Nguyen continued. “Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.”
Our children, our future, deserve better.
